The dhyanic or angelic beings proper, who are the great inspirers of humanity, and to whom the Egyptian referred as being still their teachers, did not appear in human bodies, but could only manifest themselves _through_ human beings. On the other hand, the beings in a mid-position between men and angels were still able, in very early times, to incarnate in human bodies. Hence amongst the human race inhabiting the earth in the Lemurian and Atlantean periods, we find people whose innermost soul-nature was that of an angel in a backward state; _i.e._, in the ancient Lemurian and Atlantean periods, there were not only ordinary people going about the earth, who through their successive incarnations were to arrive at what corresponds to the ideal of humanity, but beings who only outwardly appeared like the others. They had to bear a human body, for the outward form of a human being in the flesh is dependent on earthly conditions. Especially in the more ancient times did it happen that beings belonging to the lowest category of Luciferic individualities were present amongst men. And so at the same time when the angel-beings were working on human civilization through man, Lucifer-beings were also incarnated and founding human civilizations in various places. And when in the old folk-legends it is related that in some place there lived a great man who was the founder of a civilization, we are not to understand that a Lucifer-being was incarnated who must necessarily have been the vehicle of evil, for, on the contrary, human civilization received countless blessings through those beings.